LA PAZ, Bolivia -
Vice President Carlos Mesa said, urging the president to change his policies. However, Mesa said he will not resign.
Development Minister Jorge Torres, however, did step down citing insurmountable differences with the president.
The embattled president addressed the nation on radio and television after meeting with top advisers and military leaders, amid indications that his three-year-old government was weakening.
Sanchez de Lozada vowed to defeat the sedition and restore order and called the massive protests, a plot encouraged from abroad aimed at destroying Bolivia and staining our democracy with blood. He did not elaborate.
As the president spoke, marches and sporadic clashes continued in La Paz. Witnesses said demonstrators threw rocks at the residence of former President Jaime Paz Zamora, a close associate to Sanchez de Lozada. No one was injured and Paz was not at the house at the time. The presidential palace, meanwhile, was under heavy military guard.
But for the most part, yesterday's marches appeared peaceful. Radio stations were urging soldiers and police to use restraint.
Do not shoot. Let's stop the killing among Bolivians the announcers repeated.
Protesters reportedly were blocking roads in several areas in the country.
During weekend protests in El Alto, a city of 750,000 people next to La Paz, soldiers killed at least five demonstrators, according to witnesses. The government had earlier reported 11 deaths, bringing the total in that city to at least 16. The government declared martial law, sending soldiers with automatic weapons to patrol the streets.
Residents and human rights groups say the number of victims probably is close to 20.
The government had estimated that revenues from the gas exports would bring about $1.5 billion a year to Bolivia, South America's poorest nation.
But union leaders and the nation's poor Indian majority, which frequently has led protests against government attempts to privatize the country's state industries, argue the economic benefits will not reach them.
The president told an early morning news conference that he will promote a national dialogue on the gas exports.
There will be no gas exports to new markets
Sanchez de Lozada said.
He said the dialogue, in which his government will gather opinions from all sectors in the country, should last until the end of the year. Protest leaders said shelving the project won't stop the demonstrations.
We will not stop until he (the president) goes away
Roberto de la Cruz, a union leader in El Alto, said yesterday.
Also yesterday, Congressman Evo Morales, a protest leader, said that the only political solution to this crisis is the resignation of the president of the republic.
The decision to shelve the gas plan is not enough for the Bolivian people
Morales told Radio Cooperativa of Chile. What the Bolivian people want is that the gas remain in Bolivia
for the benefit of Bolivians.
The president defiantly dismissed the demands for his resignation saying that my government is the result of a popular election
and has the support of the armed forces and the police. Sanchez de Lozada, a millionaire businessman in the mining industry who grew up in the United States, was elected in 2002 to a five-year term.
He accused Morales and Felipe Quispe, another protest leader, of promoting an alleged plot to overthrow him, but at the same time offered to negotiate with them and with all sectors.
Quispe and Morales quickly rejected the offer and insisted that the president must go.
In Washington, the Organization of American States Secretary General Cesar Gaviria condemned the violence, saying yesterday that it already has cost many lives and warned that any government that arises anti-democratically is absolutely unacceptable in the Americas.
The plan called for exporting gas from Bolivia's mammoth reserves in the southern region of Tarija to the United States and Mexico.
Opponents are especially upset that the government might pick a port in Chile to ship the gas. Bolivia has been a landlocked nation since it lost its coastline in an 1879 war against Chile, and resentment against its neighbor still is strong.
Sanchez de Lozada has said he would prefer a Peruvian port, but admitted one in Chile would be technically and economically more convenient for the now idled project, which would involve a $6 billion investment by an international consortium.
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